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Breakthroughs in Urban Mobility

By Joe Mullich

“Traffic congestion has reached a tipping point,” says Duke University researcher Marcy Lowe. “In China, it wasn’t so long ago that most of road traffic was on bicycle. Now the traffic congestion from cars is paralyzing. In China, and a lot of other places around the world, cities have their backs up against the wall.”

Population increases, congestion and pollution are forcing urban centers to look for new ways to move people around. The emerging strategies are designed to be highly efficient while lessening dependency on fuel-driven cars and using the least amount of urban land.

“There have been a lot of developments in rail that allow people to move from point A to point B in a region without using their private car,” says Jeremie Desjardins, an executive with Bombardier Transportation, the global transportation giant. “The missing piece has been intermodality, or how people travel within cities once they get off the train.”

According to experts, the key to improving urban mobility is to get all the various travel mechanisms to work together in a coordinated manner. Intermodality is challenging, says Lowe, “because it really requires you to understand the specifics of a particular urban environment.”

One city that has received a significant amount of praise for intermodality innovation is Guangzhou, located about 75 miles from Hong Kong in southern China on the Pearl River. Two years ago, this important manufacturing region implemented the country’s first-ever automated people mover system in an urban setting. This helped people move more easily from the central business district to the flourishing Tianhe business and trade area.

Another urban transit solution fast gaining ground is Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), a lower cost, integrated system that has the flexibility to adapt to a variety of local conditions. “It moves a lot more people, more quickly,” says Lowe. More than 40 BRT systems now operate in South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and North America.

Guangzhou’s BRT system improves traffic congestion and air quality by allowing buses to move more efficiently with dedicated bus lanes, subway-like stations and other infrastructure improvements. It has redefined the notion of urban mobility by linking the 14 miles of bus routes to underground connections for subway stations and continuous bike lanes. The integrated BRT and bike-sharing system includes 5,500 bike parking spaces, giving people a wide array of choices to move easily throughout the dense city. The BRT won the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy’s 2011 Sustainable Transport Award. And it’s also satisfied travelers: After less than two years in service, the Guangzhou BRT boasts a daily ridership of 800,000—more than the city’s five metro lines.

As for the near future, “we need more electrification of transportation, particularly public transit,” says Richard Gilbert, a Toronto-based consultant and co-author of Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil. “Worldwide we are seeing a rapid phasing-out of diesel trains. In their place will be electrically powered trains, and there will be further growth in subway systems as well as light rail and streetcars. Any move from internal combustion engines to electric motors is a good sign.”

However, a hindrance to using electric buses and taxis—the final leg in intermodality— is that they would need to carry too many batteries to be practical for widespread use in cities. For example, an electric bus, in order to travel 150 miles (or 250 kilometers), would need to carry more than three tons of batteries before going to a charging station.

“The amount of battery an electric bus would need now is unaffordable and unpractical,” Desjardins says. “The objective of buses is to transport passengers and not batteries.”

Bombardier is applying sophisticated technology to powering electrical vehicles with PrimoveCity, which allows buses and other electrical vehicles to draw and store power as they travel, just as electric trains do. The system, which has been tested in Augsburg, Germany and Lommel, Belgium, removes the need for electric-powered vehicles to carry huge batteries or be connected to overhead wires, which can limit routes and blight the urban landscape.

With this new approach, power cables are laid inside a road. As the vehicle passes over them, a magnetic field is created. The vehicle captures the electric energy and turns it into electric current that charges the vehicle. This approach, called inductive power transfer, is already being used in electric toothbrushes, electric generators in power plants and many other technologies.

“This removes the need for overhead cabling and drastically reduces the need for batteries,” Desjardins says. “But it also removes the noise and smell that are produced by gas-powered vehicles.”

With a growing share of the global population living in cities, a broad range of tailored transportation solutions will emerge. Already there is an increased focus on planning, policy, operations and management to develop intelligent and sustainable transportation systems to meet the needs of a new generation of commuters as well as the freight mobility requirements of urban-based businesses.

Joe Mullich has received more than two dozen awards for writing about business, technology and other topics.